THE 31 DAYS OF HORROR-WEEN: PRIME EVIL: SLICE (2018) *

Slice starts off with a massive exposition dump that is so goofy and more than a little stupid that it immediately takes you aback.  You try to get your bearings, but the movie just hammers you with more and more useless world-building shit that you just have to fucking give up halfway through the longwinded explanation.  The film never recovers from that opening sequence as it kind of plateaus into a sea of unending, unfunny comedy shtick with an occasional horror movie cliché tossed in there for no good reason whatsoever. 

You see, when the local asylum was torn down, the ghosts that haunted the place had nowhere to go.  So, the town displaced them and made them live in… (are you ready for this?) Ghost Town.  A pizza delivery joint was placed on the ruins of the old asylum, and now it seems like their delivery boys are being killed off one by one.  Is it the work of a werewolf delivery boy (Doritos Spokesman, Chance the Rapper)?  Or are there other sinister forces at work?

Writer/director Austin Vesely has a lot of half-baked ideas, but there’s nothing to stick them to.  (More likely, he was fully baked when he wrote the script.)  I will say that the cinematography is kind of cool and the constant use of neon colors make the whole thing look like an overlong music video.  There’s style to spare, and absolutely no substance to be found.  Vesely probably thought he was making a statement about America being built on a burial ground, but he’s just not smart enough to see it through or come close to sticking the landing as the whole thing is pretty much a mess from frame one. 

Slice is all over the place.  It tries for an ‘80s horror-comedy vibe, but the tone and the performances are wildly uneven.  (The actors often feel like they’re acting in entirely different movies.)  The horror stuff is just too goofy to click, and the comedy shit is painfully unfunny.  It also doesn’t help that the chintzy effects (coupled with the lame humor) make Slice feel like a slightly more respectable version of a Troma movie.  The witches’ magic effects are horrible and the less said about the werewolf make-up, the better.  I mean I kept wondering why the hero never turned into a werewolf.  Then, with eight minutes left to spare in the film, we finally see the werewolf and it becomes painfully obvious why.  It looks fucking terrible. 

Another problem is that there are just too many characters.  All of them are thinly sketched and don’t leave much of an impression.  Vesely is just unable to wrangle the various subplots in any kind of meaningful manner.  These subplots include (but are not limited to) a political conspiracy involving witches, a whodunit involving delivery boys being murdered, ghosts trying to coexist with the living, and a lycanthropic Wild One kind of thing.  A movie about any one of these elements might’ve been okay.  Having all of them together just doesn’t work at all.